Sam Gilliam, acclaimed D.C. artist, dies at 88

On Jun 27, 2022

Sam Gilliam, a Washington artist who helped redefine abstract painting by liberating canvas from its traditional framework and shaking it loose in lavish, paint-spattered folds cascading from ceilings, stairwells and other architectural elements, died June 25 at his home in the District. He was 88.

The cause was kidney disease, said Adriana Elgarresta, public relations director of New York’s Pace Gallery, which represents his work, along with the David Kordansky Gallery.

Mr. Gilliam was a relatively unknown art teacher in D.C.-area schools when he burst to international attention in 1969 for an exhibition that stunned the art community with its bravado.

Resembling a painter’s giant dropcloths, his flowing, unstructured canvases, known as drapes, appeared in what was then known as the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The extravagantly colored swags of fabric were suspended from the skylight of the Beaux-Arts building’s four-story atrium and prompted then-Washington Star art critic Benjamin Forgey to summarize the impact as “one of those watermarks by which the Washington art community measures its evolution.”

In a matter of months, Mr. Gilliam would become known throughout the country and later around the world as the painter who had knocked painting out of its frame. Over a career that spanned decades and several stylistic changes — not all of them as well received as his drapes — Mr. Gilliam would forever be known as an artistic innovator because of the Corcoran show.

Mr. Gilliam was never officially a member of the Washington Color School, the District-based painting movement whose practitioners rose to international prominence in the 1960s with a celebration of pure color. But he quickly became acknowledged as the face of the Color School’s second wave.

His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, London’s Tate Modern and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

He had many public commissions, including for the Kennedy Center and a mural at Reagan National Airport. His career capstone, a commission by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, was a sprawling, five-panel work that was 28 feet wide. He called it “Yet Do I Marvel,” after the poem by Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen.

Mr. Gilliam continued to surpass himself — setting, and then breaking, multiple auction records for the price of his art, which in 2018 skyrocketed to $2.2 million for his 1971 canvas “Lady Day II.” At 83, he was invited to show at the 2017 Venice Biennale — 45 years after he made history as the first African American artist to represent his country in that exhibition. An exhibition of new work, alongside a 1977 piece, is on display at the Hirshhorn until Sept. 11.

Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum who organized the 2012 exhibition “African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond,” said Mr. Gilliam’s claim to fame was the result of a strategic move. His immediate artistic forebears, including Jackson Pollock and the other nonrepresentational painters of the 1950s, had already thoroughly upended the notion of painting as a recognizable picture.

He ‘gets painting off the wall’

What was revolutionary about Mr. Gilliam, Mecklenburg said, was the way he took painting “one step beyond” what had already been accomplished. “He’s the one,” she said, “who gets painting off the wall.”

Mr. Gilliam’s legacy, she said, is therefore less stylistic than philosophical. By tearing canvases off the wall, and by draping them on and around other architectural elements, Mr. Gilliam gave an entire generation of artists — including Christo and his wife Jean-Claude, who rose to fame in the 1970s and later with such fabric-swathed artworks as the “Wrapped Reichstag” — implicit permission to do the same.

Mr. Gilliam was not the first artist to do so. By the late 1960s, a few other painters had begun to experiment with unstretched canvases, among them Richard Tuttle in New York and William T. Wiley in San Francisco. But it was Mr. Gilliam’s sculptural, even grandiose sensibility that took the once-flat painted surface into another realm, transforming it into something a viewer feels as much as sees.

Jonathan Binstock, who organized Mr. Gilliam’s 2005-2006 retrospective at the Corcoran, observed that under Mr. Gilliam’s muscular handling, paintings became “chutes, torrents and environments.”

Although most often identified with the drape paintings, a style he would return to throughout his career, Mr. Gilliam was known for restless experimentation. In addition to the occasional foray into more-traditional stretched canvas, he also explored collage, hinged wood…